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The effects on cognition of sleeping 4 hours per night for 12-14 days

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Re: The effects on cognition of sleeping 4 hours per night for 12-14 days

#21

Post by texascloud »

hpoe wrote: post #17
praptak wrote: post #16

"Why We Sleep" by Matthew Walker summarizes quite a lot of research on sleep. It leaves little doubt - we currently know of no safe way to significantly cut down sleep. I haven't seen the research presented in that book being refuted.

https://guzey.com/books/why-we-sleep/ For those interested in someone who created a refutation to Matthew Walker's "Why We Sleep"

I wouldn't say this is refuting even a minority of claims in the book. It appears to be a thorough fact check of a small percentage of claims, some of which is going after the author over wording and inconsistencies. It's fair criticism, but by no means invalidates a majority of the information regarding sleep that Walker presents

Re: The effects on cognition of sleeping 4 hours per night for 12-14 days

#22

Post by non-entity »

I've probably done a month or two of 4 hours a night at least. My sleep is all over the place. At times, I'll slip into occasional microsleeps at the office where I basically pass put for a split second (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsleep) Very recently however, I had a two night bout of nearly total sleep deprivation (I maybe got 3 or 4 hours in a 48 hour period) and it was absolutely terrible. The second morning it was incredibly difficult to concentrate and I couldn't keep a coherent thought for a couple hours. However normally when I'm sleep deprived I can power through the morning hours and be ok the rest of the day. I did not want another night of that so I grabbed a variety of otc sleep aids hoping to find one or a combination which would knock me out. Luckily I was able to knock myself out the next night and ended that for the time being.

Re: The effects on cognition of sleeping 4 hours per night for 12-14 days

#23

Post by klodolph »

akersten wrote: post #6

I've always mused that we could somehow recover some of the "wasted" time of sleeping. 8 hours every night - a third of a human's lifespan - is just so much time. Sadly, I've never found any positive research that there's any way to do it safely. When I was younger I found schedules like the Uberman[0] and was amazed by the claim: only 2 hours of sleep a day required, as long as you stuck to a pretty rigid schedule a…

I’d say that the idea that we can recover wasted time sleeping is predicated on the idea that sleep is not a useful thing to do with our time. I think the current consensus is that there is actually many different things that our bodies and minds do while sleeping, so you couldn’t isolate one benefit of sleep and replicate it, you’d have to replicate five or ten different benefits of sleep, or more.

If you want to recover some time, try Soylent, moving closer to the office, hiring a maid to do the cleaning, etc. Assuming that these are within your means, you can recover quite a bit of time that way.

Re: The effects on cognition of sleeping 4 hours per night for 12-14 days

#24

Post by balfirevic »

akersten wrote: post #6

I've always mused that we could somehow recover some of the "wasted" time of sleeping. 8 hours every night - a third of a human's lifespan - is just so much time. Sadly, I've never found any positive research that there's any way to do it safely. When I was younger I found schedules like the Uberman[0] and was amazed by the claim: only 2 hours of sleep a day required, as long as you stuck to a pretty rigid schedule a…

> I've always mused that we could somehow recover some of the "wasted" time of sleeping. 8 hours every night - a third of a human's lifespan - is just so much time

8 hours - I wish!

Since starting freelancing full time I've been lucky enough to not need to get up at any particular time and ditched the alarm clock - but unlucky enough to find out that it takes me around 9-10 hours of sleep to wake up naturally.

Unfortunately, after getting used to it, waking to alarm now feels like torture (well, it did before too, now that I think about it).

So much time. Every day.

Re: The effects on cognition of sleeping 4 hours per night for 12-14 days

#25

Post by AlexanderNull »

akersten wrote: post #6

I've always mused that we could somehow recover some of the "wasted" time of sleeping. 8 hours every night - a third of a human's lifespan - is just so much time. Sadly, I've never found any positive research that there's any way to do it safely. When I was younger I found schedules like the Uberman[0] and was amazed by the claim: only 2 hours of sleep a day required, as long as you stuck to a pretty rigid schedule a…

I did uberman in grad school, kept it up for a few months. It technically did give me more hours in the day, however most of that free time was spent on either making sure my schedule was arranged well enough for my sleep times, or sitting around reading a book quietly at 3am because everyone else including my roommate is asleep and all businesses are closed.

The benefits weren't really as pronounced as I was hoping for. Then if you end up missing one of your scheduled sleep times it really effects you and throws you off for a day or two.

Re: The effects on cognition of sleeping 4 hours per night for 12-14 days

#26

Post by balfirevic »

texascloud wrote: post #18
praptak wrote: post #16

"Why We Sleep" by Matthew Walker summarizes quite a lot of research on sleep. It leaves little doubt - we currently know of no safe way to significantly cut down sleep. I haven't seen the research presented in that book being refuted.

This 100%. I've read the book twice, coming back to certain chapters more than twice, because it's dense with information. It's scary really. The single most impactful thing you can do as a human for your life is to prioritize 8 hours of sleep per night, full stop.

> because it's dense with information.

It also appears to be dense with misinformation.

Re: The effects on cognition of sleeping 4 hours per night for 12-14 days

#27

Post by praptak »

piercebot wrote: post #20
hpoe wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://guzey.com/books/why-we-sleep/ For those interested in someone who created a refutation to Matthew Walker's "Why We Sleep"

This refutation is authored by the same person who conducted the study to which these comments are attached :)

I did some digging and it is pretty solid to me. It's sad that Walker did not respond to this.

Re: The effects on cognition of sleeping 4 hours per night for 12-14 days

#29

Post by pstuart »

icelancer wrote: post #10
pstuart wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

yeah, with a sample size of 1 and the subject at a prime point in maturation. What's the lesson learned from this? Disclaimer: this experiment would destroy me (but I'm old enough to be the author's father).

> What's the lesson learned from this? That sleep is complicated, and that people doing scientific case studies contributes to the overall corpus of material we have to inspire others. There need not be a breakthrough everytime you do a case study for science to be useful and we should stop expecting that.

I understand that sleep is complicated, and also that there's a wide variance in how people respond to sleep (and lack of same).

I wasn't trying to shit on the OP, just that this made it to the front page of HN and has no takeaway from it. All I learned is some 22 year old guy was able to function fine on minimal sleep.

Did I miss something else? I'm genuinely curious because this is actually a subject of great interest to me.

Re: The effects on cognition of sleeping 4 hours per night for 12-14 days

#30

Post by bufferoverflow »

karpierz wrote: post #28

It seems like the author tested rote activities that were well within their comfort zone; I'd be curious to see how well they'd perform when trying to learn something new or work at something that they hadn't practiced before.

It's hard to find a "new thing" to learn that you can reliably compare to the previous "new things".
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